


take take take

by dramaturgicallycorrect



Category: BBC Radio 1 RPF, One Direction (Band)
Genre: It makes sense, M/M, Post-Break Up, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-24
Updated: 2017-05-24
Packaged: 2018-11-04 13:53:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10992264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dramaturgicallycorrect/pseuds/dramaturgicallycorrect
Summary: “Abstract art, like. I don’t get it.” Louis tilts his head. “Reckon it’s supremely uncool of me to admit it.”Nick thumps a hand to his chest. “I, for one, am shocked and appalled.”Louis squints at the pure black canvas, eyes shifting across the thick swathes of paint that only look like a pattern when you’re squinting at it as close as Louis is. Nick almost wants to tip Louis back so he doesn’t slosh his beer all over the thing.“Everyone’s always on about that bullshit, right, about like. Poetry shit, like, writing stuff that sounds deep but don’t make any sense. Stuff that you need a bloody degree to understand. Like people who just write like normal people or who, like, I dunno, fucking draw a bowl of fruit are somehow less than.”Louis’ not exactly standing on a table saying,I sing pop music, you fucks, love me anyway,but. He might has well have done.[Or some people give give give and some people take take take.]





	take take take

**Author's Note:**

  * For [darlingjustdont](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darlingjustdont/gifts).



> sasha my dearest darling love on the occasion of your birthday. i tried three separate ways to write you a tomlinshaw, but all I ever really liked was this scene. i'm gonna write you something else, i promise, but i hope this is chill in the meantime.
> 
> i imagine it comes after [ this scene.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7541476/chapters/17147743)

Louis stands across the room, looking a little lost. Nick would think it’s because of the painting he’s staring at -- admittedly, it’s quite the thinker -- but he’s spent most of the night wandering around, looking out of place on his own.

Not that Nick’s been watching him. It’s just he’s got one of them looks on that could be considered devastating if you looked at it head on, blazer sleeves rolled up, skinnies curving in the right places, a quiff higher than Nick’s, not that that’s too difficult these days.

Honestly, sometimes Nick can go a whole bloody year without seeing Louis Tomlinson in anything other than a professional capacity, and he’s run into him twice in as many months. Enough that he’s able to catalog the differences between Louis smoking in an alleyway behind a theatre with soothing words and a wry tilt to his lips, and this Louis puttering around like a lamb that’s lost its shepherd. 

And really, Nick’s not much better off than the last time he saw Louis, but at least he’s not crying. He  _ is _ , admittedly, wearing a jumper with  _ Crying inside _ stitched on it because he’s got a theme to adhere to.

But Nick’s doing things for himself now. If  _ doing things for himself _ means sequestering himself in his flat, never leaving or talking to anyone unless he’s going to work or taking the dogs on a walk or he’s forcibly dragged kicking and screaming to an art gallery.

And he’s off men. He supposes he’s doing that for himself too.

They’ve all made a pact not to tell each other which of the canvases is there own -- Nick’s got one, Pixie’s got one, rumor has it even Yoko Ono’s sent one in. That’s the thrill of it, in some sort of weird way, Nick supposes. Buy a bit of art by a celeb just to say you have done, but you’re never sure which one’s done it. 

Nick keeps a wide berth around his own, so no one connects the pieces, but he finds his eye being drawn to it regularly, checking the expressions of anyone he catches looking at it, just to see what they think.

He somehow had no issue pouring his heart out all over a canvas. Nick overshares professionally. He gets paid a fairly reasonable fee for it.

He keeps a spare eye on his own painting, but not Louis, and that’s how Louis ends up standing next to him before he realizes it, both of them staring up at the painting that Nick’s pretty certain comes from Ozzy Osbourne. 

“I don’t get it.”

Nick looks at him. He’s devastating. “What’s that?”

“Abstract art, like. I don’t get it.” Louis tilts his head. “Reckon it’s supremely uncool of me to admit it.”

Nick thumps a hand to his chest. “I, for one, am shocked and appalled.” 

Louis squints at the pure black canvas, eyes shifting across the thick swathes of paint that only look like a pattern when you’re squinting at it as close as Louis is. Nick almost wants to tip Louis back so he doesn’t slosh his beer all over the thing.

“Everyone’s always on about that bullshit, right, about like. Poetry shit, like, writing stuff that sounds deep but don’t make any sense. Stuff that you need a bloody degree to understand. Like people who just write like normal people or who, like, I dunno, fucking draw a bowl of fruit are somehow less than.” 

Louis’ not exactly standing on a table saying,  _ I sing pop music, you fucks, love me anyway _ , but. He might has well have done. 

Nick’s not surprised Louis’ a little defensive, him and his lads spending however many years being told what they're making isn’t  _ real music _ or some other form of nonsense, just because it’s a bit popular. When he can get Harry to talk about his music, Harry says the same thing.

Nick gets it, in a way, and could be a bit of a snob sometimes if he’s not properly checked. He does like this art, but not because it’s some sort of unknowable thing. Maybe people are giving credit where it’s not entirely due.

“I think, like. It’s sort of cool, right, that it’s anything you want it to be,” Nick tries, giving Louis something of an out as they move to the next piece. “Sort of looks a bit like nonsense, but really it’s just whatever you want. What’s that hexagon mean? Oh, it’s just representing the fall of capitalism. You don’t need to be told what it is by the bloke who did it, you know?”

Louis looks back at the painting, his face shifting into something truly pensive instead of just confused. “I reckon you might have a point. That hexagon is almost certainly about the fall of capitalism.”

Louis rolls his eyes and scoots over to the next painting, taking a deep swig out his bottle.

“I have been wondering what a place like this is doing in a bloke like you,” Nick admits with a hum. “If you’re so miserable about it.”

Louis grins, a quick sharp thing. “Publicist says I should be papped doing more  _ adult things _ . And before you ask, no, getting shitfaced in a club is apparently not  _ adult _ .”

“Getting shitfaced in an art gallery is adult though?”

“D’you know, I think it is,” Louis says lightly. 

Nick… doesn’t have an argument against that.

By some sort of silent agreement, they walk the length of the gallery together. Louis very graciously leaves off asking after Nick, considering the last time they met, Nick rubbed his snot all over Louis’ shirt and then forty seconds later, Louis was gone. Or maybe he just doesn’t remember. He’s probably got loads of people crying all over him.

Nick’s jumper is doing all the work for him anyway, communication-wise.

Louis comes to a stop in front of Nick’s painting, eyes tracing the bold strokes, the thin lettering.  _ Take Take Take.  _

Nick feels exposed, suddenly, in a way he has yet to all evening, now that Louis Tomlinson’s assessing him. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if Louis takes the piss. Probably run, crying outside instead of in.

Louis doesn’t, though. His voice gets soft in this sort of way Nick isn’t overly used to, even after last time, and he asks, “What’s the story with this one, then?”

“Bloke got his heart broke.”

“A bloke?”

“Yeah, a girl’d do up something a bit nicer than all this,” Nick tries to laugh.

“Take, take, take,” Louis reads, the question in it. 

Nick’s yet to explain, can’t put it into words purely by nature of the gallery’s anonymity, not that he’d ever wanted to. But he finds himself spilling it to all to Louis. “Some people, y’know, they just take and they take and you give and you give. And then one day, maybe, you wake up and there’s nothing left. You’ve given it all, they’ve taken it all.”

Louis is silent for a moment. “What happens then?”

“You fall apart,” Nick says, and it hangs between them, its echo reverberating until it becomes deafening. Nick stands next to him and prays to whoever’s listening that Louis doesn’t call him on it, that Louis’ sharp eyes don’t see right through him, that his sharp tongue doesn’t cut him in half.

“Sounds about right,” Louis decides, and Nick sighs out as much relief as he can, as silently as he can. Louis looks like he’s been through the wringer himself. “Need a smoke, yeah?” 

Nick nods easily and follows him through the room, trusting him when he doesn’t head toward the front door. He supposes there are still cameras that way.

“Where’s your plus one?” Nick casts around for her, gorgeous thing that she is. “Surely she didn’t leave you to suffer adulthood alone.”

“Finished with me.”

Nick’s head snaps back. He expects that to be a joke. It’s not. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

Louis leads them out the back door -- he must have some sort of sixth sense for back doors, given his track record -- and they stop up as soon as the air hits them, straddling that delicate line between the heat of summer and the chill of fall.

“Suspect everyone will. In a few days’ time.” His lips press thin for a moment, like maybe he’s getting ready to strike. “Do you think my attending this adult function will somehow overshadow the breakup in the news cycle?”

“I’ll be sure to focus on your fondness for art galleries, for sure. It is the Breakfast Show, after all.”

Louis laughs, a weak thing, not even a rueful grin to accompany it. “Ta very much.”

Nick curls his hands into his sleeves as much as he can as Louis lights up a cigarette. It’s easier than Nick thought it would be to just sit in silence next to each other. Sometimes he thinks Louis’ a virtual stranger, someone he’s met enough and chatted with enough (or argued with enough) to call an acquaintance, someone to give a sterile hug to when you’re both out at the same place. But he’d be hard pressed to call him a friend. 

He thinks maybe he’d like that, to be Louis Tomlinson’s friend, but even as cripplingly old as he is, he’s never quite got the hang of exactly how to ask someone to be his friend. It just sort of happens. Organic, like.

So he stays quiet, in proximity, watching Louis take rhythmic drags and tilt his head away to blow smoke so it’s not wafting into Nick’s face. Nick’s off men, off relationships altogether, really, but it is quite nice to just… be with someone. To have companionship. To know you’re here with someone and they’re here with you, and that’s all you need to know.

“We both decided it was for the best, you know. Amiable,” Louis says, the suddenness of it nearly startling Nick out of his stream of consciousness.

“Amicable.”

“What’s that?”

“Amicable breakup, like, it’s mutual, it’s fine, right? Amiable, that’s like some Jane Austen shit, like.” Nick clears his throat and puts on his best posh nagging mum voice. “The Colonel Louis William Tomlinson, a gentleman of the most  _ amiable _ nature, with a manor house up at Doncastershirefield. I hear he makes twenty thousand pounds a  _ year _ .”

Louis cracks a smile for the first time in what feels like millennia. “Better be more than twenty thousand pounds.”

“Inflation, or something like that,” Nick says, when what he really means is  _ I can’t believe you’re a fucking millionaire _ . 

Louis nods and smokes and thinks hard enough it looks like smoke’s also coming from his ears. Usually Nick could chat and chat to fill the silence, but he’s still smarting from the last time he’d been told he should learn to shut the fuck up sometimes. Even if it was months back.

It hits him, sometimes, hard and fast, when he’s going about his business, doing what he normally does, what he thought people loved him for. Then the brakes come screeching to a halt and  _ you should learn to just shut the fuck up _ echoes around his brain. And then Nick shuts the fuck up. He's taken this from Nick too.

“We said it was amicable,” Louis says, low enough his words could be lost in the winter wind, “but she should have finished with me a while back.”

Nick feels a subconscious flare of defensiveness on Louis’ behalf. “Surely not.”

Louis shakes his head and takes a drag like he’s inhaling truth or confidence along with the nicotine. “I think -- I took too much.”

That hits Nick like a slap to the face, but he rallies. For Louis. Or to protect himself. It doesn’t look like Louis’ fit to cry in his jumper in payment of his debt or anything.

“You’ll have a new one, surely, girls chomping at the bit.”

“Dunno why they should,” Louis says, quick and dirty enough that maybe Nick can’t hear it. Nick hears it just fine. He clears his throat like that’ll clear away his feelings. “Anyway I’m off relationships for a while. Sort of just. Ended up with a kid off my last rebound.”

Two peas in a pod, they are. Minus the whole... child thing. “That’s all right. I’m off men.”

Louis looks pained for a moment, like what he said hit him just then. “I didn’t mean it that way like. Ended up with a kid. I just -- like, I love him more than anything in this world -- ”

“No, I got it.” Nick reaches out tentatively, in full view of Louis’ eyes, like he would a dog he’s trying to introduce himself, and slowly slides his way onto Louis’ shoulder. 

Louis doesn’t jerk away, but pushes into it. “Me mouth’s always running about four miles ahead of everything else, you know?”

“Hm. That ever get you in trouble?” Nick grins.

“A time or two, yeah.” Louis grins back. 

Something’s broken between them, somewhere between  _ Take Take Take  _ and now. Nick wonders how long he’s going to be allowed to keep this up. 

“I didn’t know you knew my middle name.”

“It’s not -- I mean, I didn’t go, like,  _ searching _ for it, you know,” Nick stutters. He’s not -- he hasn’t, like. It doesn’t matter. “The information is out there.”

Louis quirks his eyebrows like he doesn’t quite believe Nick, but he nods after the gallery door before Nick can shove his own foot any further down his throat. “I should get home.” 

“Sure, yeah, of course.” Nick takes his arm back and patently pretends there’s absolutely nothing remarkable about the fact that he’s just had his arm around Louis Tomlinson. That’s twice now this year, and it’s -- nice. It’s nice.

“If you -- like, if you ever just need a mate,” Nick continues. “I’m sure you have a wealth of mates or, whatever. You know what I mean. If you need someone to do adult things with. I’m around. And, conveniently, an adult.”

“Could have fooled me,” Louis says warmly, it doesn’t cut like Nick expects it to.

“I’m just saying, give me a ring.”

Louis looks at him for a while, like an appraisal, before he says, “Yeah. Thanks. I will.” 

It feels different, in a way Nick can’t put his finger on. Louis’ so soft, practically demure, a fizzled out firecracker left on the ground after all its sparks have been used up. It looks wrong on him, even if Nick’s let himself get burned a time or two by Louis’ sparks. Louis shouldn’t look like this.

He remembers what Louis’d said to him, the last time they were here. “Well. Don’t let the bastards get you down?”

Louis shrugs, his hand on the door, and gives one of his sharp grins. “Ah. You know me.”

“Yeah,” Nick says, but he’s not actually sure if he does. But he kind of wants to.

\--

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you kindly for reading. If you need me, I'm [here](http://wickershire.tumblr.com). If you need a reference for Nick's painting, it's [here](https://www.instagram.com/p/BLRxwaTD77t/).


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